


look beyond the frame (and watch the world burn)

by Skiewrites



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BAMF Peter Parker, Gen, Hurt Peter Parker, No Time Travel!!!, POV Peter Parker, Peter Parker Angst, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Peter Parker is a Mess, Peter Parker-centric, Tony snapped insead, important!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-24
Updated: 2019-12-01
Packaged: 2020-07-19 04:53:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19968343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skiewrites/pseuds/Skiewrites
Summary: Peter Parker was left to face the outcome of the snap alone, with nowhere to call home, no one to call family left, and no desire to be the local neighborhood Spiderman that he once loved.But, as years pass and those around him begin to move on from their losses, things begin to look up for Peter, with the exception of the small nagging voice that demands him that he could do something, that tells him that there's something he could do to bring back those he lost in the past. So, when a Mr. Scott Lang knocks on the Avenger Compound door, Peter couldn't help but take it as the sign to go through with a crazy dimension-hopping plan that had been building in the back of his mind since he came back to Earth all those years ago.(Tony Stark is the one to become dust instead of Peter Parker AU)





	1. The Spider Sense

**Author's Note:**

> So this fic was called 'Hurt it then fix it fic' in my notes and I stand by that statement, and I would be sorry but I am not. Like the tags say, I will not be calling what the MCU called time travel time travel, which will be explained in later chapters, but the basics are the fact that it is simply not time travel in my mind. I am currently writing a Time Travel AU after infinity war that just doesn't include endgame and can be found on my main profile. 
> 
> This fic will also include spoilers for Spiderman: Far From Home, so if you haven't seen it, I do recommend watching it as the second half of the fic will be taking major major major story beats from it. 
> 
> Other than that, enjoy!

If there was something about his powers that he had yet to understand, it was something that he called his 'Spidey Sense'.

May loved to call it his 'Peter Tingle', which just sounded wrong in every single conceivable way possible, based on what he had told her about it when she found out about him being Spiderman, but it was way, way, way more than just a single nudge in the back of his mind telling him what the danger was and what to do about it. If only, actually, because then it would make everything easier to deal with. 

No, it always started at the back of his neck, no matter the situation. And it grows. It grows from the back of his neck and up to the crown of his head, travels forward towards his temples and his eyes and down again towards his ears. Each and every time, it is a striking pain, like the one you would get when you got a migraine, except each threat, had a different intensity. Something silly like a banana from his aunt or a paper ball from Flash would be mild, while something like bullets was so painful that it made his mind blank for a second with sudden pain, leaving his body and therefore his instincts in charge of his actions for a moment, meaning that he got out of the way of the danger before he even knew about it. It was great for his unpredictability, since that way no one would know about his next move, including himself.

It was great in life or death situations, like explained above, but not much so in situations like Flash’s attempts to annoy him, not when his body was always picking out every single thing that could minorly inconvenience him at any moment, leaving him to almost always ignore everything that his so-called ‘Spidey Sense’ was telling him at these times.

This was no one of those times.

Thanos had left with the Time Stone, thanks to Mr Doctor Strange giving it away to the guy that they were supposed to be stopping. Despite this, Peter couldn’t help but feel glad that he had done that, because it meant that he still had Mr Stark, even if he had a gaping hole in his side caused by his own technology. This was nothing to Mr Stark though, he was sure of it, because he had gone through so much more than stab wounds through his life. Not to underrate the new trauma that he had gone through of course, but the point that a stab wound was something that was easy to heal once they got back to Earth, and Peter had made sure to put some special webbing over it in the meantime, something that Peter had often used on himself before he got back to his apartment and to the first aid kit that he had hidden underneath his bed, for the ‘just in case’ situations.

“Why did you do that?” Mr Stark grunted out, trying to stand up, only for Peter to push him back down to sitting again, making sure that the wound had not been aggregated in the sudden movement, after all, Mr Stark did not have the same accelerated healing that Peter himself had. The words were obviously directed at Mr Doctor Strange, and was something that the rest of the group clearly had on their minds, but not wanting to say it aloud, not wanting to hear about their own defeat.

“It was the only thing I could do,” Mr Doctor Strange muttered thoughtfully, as if there was much to ponder about anymore, not when it was clear that at least half of them would not be leaving this planet at the rate that things had been going before Thanos left.

“Like hell it was! What happened to 'let us die before he got the Stone'!” Mr Stark suddenly yelled at the wizard, everyone else staying out of the argument but throwing looks at the two.

“You’re our only chance…” Mr Doctor Strange muttered before Peter felt it. His Spider Sense.

But something was off about it, something that was rare to feel. It was all over his head like it normally was when it was something big, when it was life-threatening, but instead of the huge stinging strikes it usually sent him, it was a mild throbbing.

Someone else was going to die. Someone close to him…

“Nononono….” Peter muttered in a panic as he grabbed a hold of Mr Stark. It seemed to surprise the older man, as well as the rest of the group as they gathered closer together to see if they get a better picture of what Peter was panicking about, but as Mr Star Lord stepped forward, his leg disappeared to a fine dust, causing to him to fall forward and disappear before he smacked his head against the harsh rock of Titan. The rest of the group seemed to do the same, but Peter paid them no heed as he grabbed onto Mr Stark tighter, much to his shock as he looked around at everyone being blown away by the wind, before he looked at himself, noting at the way his own arm was falling apart at the seams.

“I’m so sorry kid…” He muttered, before looking back up at Peter, using his other arm to pull his attention away from his slowly deuterating arm to look him in the eye, and smiled at him, the same one that fangirls would rant about and Aunt May would moan about for hours.

“When you get home… Ask for Edith…” Mr Stark muttered, seemingly quieter than he wanted. Peter went to ask for more, ask before the dust reached his chest and his arc reactor and his head and before he could no longer ask any more questions to someone he thought of as a father figure, a thought he had not let himself entertain before just now. But, before he could get the question out of his head, there was a pressure on his shoulder, causing him to suddenly look up at Mr Doctor Strange, who himself did not look too well himself.

“I’m sorry Peter, but it was the only way.” At the last word, the fabric that Peter had held tightly in his hands suddenly disappeared, causing him to fall through the space that Tony Stark, his mentor, had once been, leaving only rocks and a scattering of dust. Looking back had shown him that Mr Doctor Stephen Strange had too disappeared from the universe.

He stayed crouched in front of the dust, watching it fly away in the slight breeze that Titan had, before the blue lady robot person came into his vision, pulling him out of his thoughts and pulling him towards the smaller ship that the group, the Guardians of the Galaxy as they were calling themselves, came in. He did not argue as she placed him in a chair, the straps digging into his back despite the metal armour that covered his normal suit. He sat there, dazed, as he listed to the banging and scraping of metal in the background, the only thing keeping him centred at this point.

Mr Stark was gone.

Tony Stark was gone.

_Tony was gone._

“Kid.”

The word kicked Peter out of his dazed state, leaving him staring at the blue woman who had dragged him onto the ship.

_Mr Stark had called him ‘kid’ too._

“Yeah?” His words were softly whispered, but in the silence of a mourning universe, they were loud and clear for his now only companion in the middle of space.

“I…” There was hesitation in her voice, before she looked away from him and around at the desolation of the rest of the planet. “We need to get going, there’s nothing here for us anymore.”

* * *

She asked for his help on this ship, and Peter found himself unsurprisingly lacking on the finer points of fixing a spaceship.

“I need you to connect the Megadrive to the reactor through the secondary system,” She asked as she fixed another part of the ship, only for Peter to blankly stare at her before she rolled her eyes and pointed each thing out to him.

“Are you sure you’re qualified to fix something as complex as this?” She sneered at him. Peter tried not to take her words to heart. He was not the only person to lose people in the fight and the aftermath, he knew this, he saw this, but…

_It hurt._

“Yeah… I’ve helped fix other things, things just as complex, I think, since the web shooters I use are pretty complicated now and so is my suit, as well as the nanobots…” Peter couldn’t finish the sentence, leaving an awkward silence before he went back to speaking, not noticing the tears slipping past his eyes, “but never a spaceship, since we don’t have that sort of travel on Earth… yet I guess.” She let out a huff at his words, the most words he had spoken in the last couple of days.

With more pointing and explaining things out like he was an idiot, they were able to get the ship in the air after three days of being stranded on Titan.

* * *

There’s not much to do on the ship, unsurprisingly.

After the long event that was fixing the ship, the alien had come to see that Peter couldn’t pilot the ship, giving Peter a blank look when he joked that he didn’t even have his driver’s licence yet.

She was a tough one, Peter decided, after pulling out all of the stocks to make her even react at this point, let alone laugh at one of his crappy jokes. Even things that would make even make MJ crack and let out a snort would fall seemingly flat.

The most that he got out of her so far was a tilt of the head in confusion when he mentioned a meme, one he was looking at on his phone before that blasted spaceship came to Earth and ruined his life.

When he wasn’t looking for ways to lift the mood of his only other companion on the ship, he was sleeping. He wasn’t stupid. He knew that the thing that was converting carbon dioxide to oxygen was broken beyond repair, he knew that his days were down to countable, even the slowly dwindling rations promised his death.

He was going to die in space.

He didn’t have much heart to fight for anything else.

* * *

The ship had a lot of loose paper.

It surprised Peter. He would have thought that space would mean that you had to limit the resources that you were using, but it seemed that, at least this crew, the crew that died on Titan, didn’t seem to care much about that. There was a lot of paper, some of it better quality than others, but it was paper and paper meant paper cranes.

It was the only thing he remembered about Mary Parker. They would sit at the kitchen table and fold and fold until they were surrounded by the little things. He didn’t remember her face, her voice, her scent, but he remembered folding paper into beautiful little creatures that filled their home, despite how seemingly useless they looked.

“What are you doing?” Peter looked up at Nebula, before looking down at the crane he had just made. The folds weren’t perfect, casing it to be slightly unbalanced and always falling over, but it was something to do here, something that he remembered of Earth, something that he remembered of his mother, and it was the small comfort that he was able to give himself in the middle of uncharted space.

“I’m making paper cranes, it’s something I used to do on Earth,” he swallowed hard, frowning as he saw that he was tilting her head at him again, not too dissimilar to a computer processing now that Peter thought about it.

“Do you want to make some?” The question slipped past his lips without his consent, surprising him as much as the other. Nonetheless, she sat down and joined him.

By the time that Peter closed his eyes, there was not a surface that was not littered with the things, even the oddly shaped and unbalanced ones.

They only had a day or so left of oxygen now, so when he closed his eyes, he thought it would be the final time, so he wasn’t surprised to open his eyes to a face that stared deeply at him, her blonde hair fanning her face and a beautiful surrounding her.

He had thought that would be the last thing he would see as he closed his eyes, so when he woke up again, especially on a bed, inside a building that he recognised.

He was in the Avenger’s compound, on Earth.

He was home.


	2. The Avenger's Compound

Peter woke up hungry.

But, despite this, Peter found himself having no desire to get out of bed, the blanket cocooing him in a warmth that he hadn't felt in what seemed like forever, the pillow underneath his head supporting him in a way that he could forget about the aches and pains in his back and his neck.

He could almost roll over and go back to sleep, forgetting about everything that had been happening in the last couple of weeks.

But the sight of Mr. Stark disintegrating into dust and being picked up by the light breeze came to him every time he closed his eyes.

_"When you get home... Ask for Edith..."_

His last orders, his last words, were ringing in his ears, echoing and disorienting.

Getting out of bed, Peter nearly fell back into it as all of his blood rushed to his head and make him go lightheaded, black spots flashing in front of his eyes for a minute as he grabbed the bedside table to steady himself as the feeling washed through his system.

Once the feeling passed, he was quick to stumble out of the room.

Walking around the compound was somehow haunting.

It was just as empty as Peter remembered, as not a lot of people worked in such a large building like at Stark Towers, but even knowing what had happened at Titan would have happened here on Earth was enough to feel the absence of those who should have been here, working hard to make sure that the world was protected from the bad guys.

But the bad guy won this time, and it was a haunting feeling indeed.

Muscle memory gets him to the kitchen, and his hunger gets him opening the fridge and cupboards, having a look at what was available, before getting the peanut butter and bread out. High calories would be important right now, vital even after the lack of calories over the past so many days in space and the intense fights that came before that.

It was quick to make the sandwiches, and somehow quicker to get halfway through the rather large stack he made himself, but the food in front of him was not enough for him to relax, and his paranoia paid off when he heard footsteps, not ones he recognised, walk towards the room, and the door still made a sound when it opened despite it being well oiled and maintained by the maintenance crew, people who probably didn't exist anymore.

"Ah, the spider kid is up then?"

Peter didn't turn to greet the person, so he wasn't surprised when they joined him at the table, though he was surprised to see it was Falcon.

"I'm Sam." The other supplied. It was a normal name, especially for a superhero, and Peter found that strange, even if he was a superhero with a normal name. 

"Peter." He replied, but he found that words were getting stuck in his throat, which wasn’t like him. Usually he was a million words a minute, but now he could barely get one word out of him. 

"Not very chatty, are ya?" Peter knew this was just supposed to be an ice breaker, something for him to contradict and them to fall into simple conversations, but, taking another bite of the sandwich, Peter found that he couldn't take having light-hearted conversations at that moment in time.

"It's the shock of watching five people disappear into thin air, though I'm sure I'll come around at some point." Peter muttered instead, taking another bite of the sandwich, though he found that, if he ate any more of it, he may throw up, and instead decided to focus on swallow the last piece rather than trying to make it through the rest of the pile he had left over.

What a waste.

"That's fair," Peter looked up to see Sam relax into the chair, crossing his arms.

"What's the plan?" Peter asked, looking down at his sandwiches and felt bad for making so many, for wasting so much when food would be a shortage soon when people still run around figuring out what to do.

"I believe that we're currently waiting for people to arrive. We're having a huge meeting about everything in the next couple of days, once we have everyone here." Everyone left, was left unsaid for obvious reasons, but Peter tried to push past it. There were more important things to worry about now.

"Are you done? There's a couple of questions that we need to ask, a debrief of sorts. We've gotten a lot of the answers from Nebula, but there's just a couple of things that are unclear, since she joined the battle half-way through?" Peter nodded, picking up his sandwiches and binning them before following Sam down the corridors to a wing that he hadn't been in before. It wasn't surprising, really, since Peter had only really needed to go the labs, his allocated room and the kitchen before, though he could remember the numerous amount of times he's watched Mr Stark come and go from the corridor, going to some meetings and escaping the rest.

There had been times when he had wanted to follow him down these corridors, to see what all of the fuss was about despite knowing that half of it would be boring and disappointing, but now he felt like a child being dragged to the headmaster's office for being naughty.

Sam walked through a door, but Peter found himself stuck in the doorway looking on everyone who was in the room. Some of the occupants didn’t surprise him, Captain America and Black Widow he recognised from the whole civil war things, Thor and Dr Bruce he recognised because of his long time following of the Avengers from when Loki first attacked New York, but the rest of the group he drew a blank on with the exception of Nebula from the rather long space trip they had the unfortunate luck of being on.

“This is the Spiderman that you were talking about?” The woman with long blonde hair asked before she did a quick look up and down him, making him feel very awkward, “He’s young, like what, ten?”

“I’m fifteen.” Peter butted in, only to realise afterwards that she was probably just trying to joke around, but even after that knowledge Peter found that he didn’t want to joke around, not when half of the population had just disappeared into nothing.

“That’s still young,” Captain America pointed out, and as peter looked into his eyes, he wondered what happened for these eyes to be so different form those videos he watched during detentions, where everyone would make different jokes from the Captain’s words.

“They usually start young,” Black Widow stated before she gestured Peter to come more into the room.

“Wait, should we even be involving him, he is only fifteen.” The blonde-haired stranger pointed out.

“I have as much right to be here as you do,” Peter bit out to the stranger, who only raised her arms up at Peter’s words, taking a step back from him.

“What she means is that this isn’t your fight,” Captain America tried to calm Peter down, but there never seemed to be anything right now that would be able to calm the teenager. No, he had watched way too many people turn to dust right in front of his eyes to calm down right now.

“Isn’t my fight? I’m the neighbourhood Spiderman, but I don’t need to look outside to know that, now, I don’t have a neighbourhood now to protect.” Peter pointed out, looking at the rest of the room. There were a couple of people that he assumed were Wakandans, Thor and Bruce stood in the background, not confident to fight the people that they hadn’t seen in the last couple of years. Sam stood between Black Widow and Captain America, and the strange woman who looked human but felt otherworldly stood on the other side of the table, along with a strange racoon thing that was very attached to the gun like weapon that he held close to his chest.

“We understand that, but you’re not coming with us to Thanos.” Black Widow

“It’s not going to work.

“You don’t know what we’ve got planned

“It doesn’t matter what you have planned. I watched Mr Stark, Mr Strange, who had the stones himself, and half of the Guardians of the Galaxy take Thanos on when he had less stones, and we still lost. How do you defeat a man who thinks he’s already won?” Peter asked them all before deciding he was done here, leaving the room and the people who looked at each other with worry. He walked for a couple of minutes, wondering around using muscle memory to dictate where he went, before he stopped dead in a random corridor.

“FRIDAY?” Peter asked the silent corridor, swallowing tightly when no response came.

He walked past his room and went straight to Mr Stark’s room, not stopping in the doorway for permission from a dead man, and went straight for his drawers, picking up the phone that he knew that would be in there. He sat down on the made bed, trying not to look around at the empty room wand the dust that it held, and instead tried to work up the courage to open the phone.

“Peter?” He looked up to see Captain America looking at him, and the room, from the doorway, something in him being too scared to walk into the room. Good, Peter thought, he doesn’t deserve to be in here. Not after everything that happened during the civil war as Peter liked to dub it. While Mr Stark hadn’t told him everything about what had happened, the news covered a lot, and everything else Peter was able to glean from FRIDAY’s database, and from the way that Mr Stark didn’t seem to stop from doing so, as there was no way that he was that good at hacking to not be noticed, it was Captain America and the rest of his team that was in the wrong.

“What?” Peter asked, wincing at how harsh his words seemed to be coming out today, but finding no energy to apologise for his actions, even though he knew that he probably should.

“I’m sorry, for everything.”

“Everything?” Peter asked, confused as to what he meant. There was a lot that the elder should be sorry for, but nothing that Peter could think of that could be directed at himself.

“Well, I know that we haven’t been the kindest to you back there, and there is the fact that I did drop a plane on you that one time,” the older man joked, and Peter couldn’t help but let out a snort when he thought to the previous year, when his biggest problem was wondering if he should fight in a superhero civil war or do his Spanish homework. How simple things used to be.

“Hmm? I’ve had worse, so you can clear your conscience Captain.” Peter replied as he looked back down at the phone, the screen still switched off.

“Call me Steve.” Peter hummed in agreement, and they both lulled into an awkward silence that sat heavy between the two of them, but Peter found that he had nothing he wanted to say to Steve.

“We’re going to be going tomorrow. We know where Thanos will be.” Peter rolled his eyes at the statement but said nothing about the subject. They all knew how he felt about the subject.

“I won’t be when you get back.” Peter warned, and Steve seemed to accept this fact quite quickly.

“Well, don’t be a stranger then,” he said, but before he could say anything else to make everything more awkward, Peter stood and went to leave the room for his own. He had some packing to do before he went home. He would not leave without his suit.

“One more thing,” Peter said as he turned around to look at Captain America. He looked young, only a couple of year older than Peter, which was strange to think about, “Do you know anything about Edith? Mr Stark mentioned it to me before he-” the rest of the sentence got stuck in his throat before he could get it out, but Steve seemed to understand, his brow furrowing before he shook his head.

“No, sorry Peter.” Peter nodded in understanding. It didn’t surprise him; the pair hadn’t been on speaking terms before the whole alien thing started.

Peter walked back to his room in silence, and he sat on his bed before opening one of many of Mr Stark’s phones. The phone unlocked easily for Peter, Mr Stark never hid anything of high important on the phone without the help of FRIDAY, so he never bothered to lock them, and he quickly found himself to the contact section.

He typed in Aunt May’s number, letting the phone ring once, twice, three times, before a voice came along and told him that the number was discontinued.

Peter was gone from the Avenger’s Compound by the time the sun set over the horizon over a new world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise I haven't abandoned this! I have been very busy with a lot of things, ranging from getting a new laptop, moving out and starting uni to participating in a couple of events over Christmas. There will be a lot more updates for this fic and my other marvel fic in the new year, as well as my other Voltron fics and maybe some other new fics that I have been planning for a while now, but I won't spoil anything here. Please leave me a comment and/or Kudos to tell me what you thought of this update!

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me on Tumblr under the name Skiewrites, and please leave comments and kudos! I have a lot of plans for this fic, and they're very big plans, but I'm bad at updating at the moment, so just know that this will not be abandoned.


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